What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Until I brought my fake girlfriend home.When I took a seat next to the gorgeous brunette at the blackjack table, I had no idea it would be the start of the hottest weekend of my life. By day, Stevie and I dominate the casinos of Sin City.By night, I dominate her in my penthouse suite.Then my brother Samuel ruins it by asking me to come home for his engagement party.Because he's not just getting married. This isn't a normal celebration for me. His future bride is my 'one who got away.' The girl I may or may not still be in love with. The catch? He wants me to prove I'm over his fiancée before they set a date. So I ask Stevie to double down on our chemistry and pretend to be my girlfriend.We set our ground rules: lots of sex, plenty of pretend smiles, and no strings.But we're not only gambling with the truth. We're gambling with our hearts.They say every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future. But Stevie's past may force us to fold on our future before it's even begun.SOUTHERN SINNER is a full-length, standalone novel in the North Carolina Highlands Series. Coming April 22!

In Contemporary Southern Identity, Rebecca Bridges Watts explores the implications of four public controversies about southern identity—debates about the Confederate flag in South Carolina, the gender integration of the Virginia Military Institute, the display of public art in Richmond, and Trent Lott's controversial comments regarding Strom Thurmond's 1948 segregationist presidential bid. While such debates may serve as evidence of the South's “battle over the past,” they can alternatively be seen as harbingers of a changing South. These controversies highlight the diversity of voices in the conversation of what it means to be a southerner. The participants in these conflicts may disagree about what southern identity should be, but they all agree that such discussions are a crucial part of being southern. Recent debates as to the place of Old South symbols and institutions in the South of the new millennium are evidence of a changing order. But a changing South is no less distinctive. If southerners can find unity and distinctiveness in their identification, they may even be able to serve as a model for the increasingly divided United States. The very debates portrayed in the mass media as evidence of an “unfinished Civil War” can instead be interpreted as proof that the South has progressed and is having a common dialogue as to what its diverse members want it to be.

Seeking redemption for the secret murder of her preacher thirty years earlier, a woman on the cusp of realizing her dreams is destroyed when Hurricane Katrina's wrath unleashes the preacher's car from its watery grave and reopens the mystery of his disappearance.The setting is Alabama, summer of 1969. Integration. Racial and Social unrest and Sexual awakenings. It is the story of Kitty Bankhead, 16, caught in an unending struggle with her innate, desperate faith. She has her heart set on leaving behind her childhood of genteel poverty and becoming a Broadway actress, following in the footsteps of her famous cousin, Tallulah. Her plans are derailed when she is brutally raped by her Preacher, Glen Duvall – who has a mysterious and sinister background, and murders him in his secret lair. With the help of her best friend, they bury his body and push his car into the murky waters of the Black Warrior River.Thirty years later, Hurricane Katrina stirs up every creek and river in Alabama and the aqua blue Cadillac of Glen Duvall surfaces, summoning Kitty to return home to face questions from a newly appointed prosecutor set on solving the thirty year old mystery of the preacher's disappearance. The secrets lie in what the river has unearthed, for the river keeps what it needs and the rest is washed to the sea.SINNER FROM THE SOUTH is more than a novel; it is a journey for every soul who searches for redemption.________________________________"When a book leaves your hands, it belongs to God. He may use it to save a few souls or to try a few others, but I think that for the writer to worry is to take over God's business. " Flannery O'ConnorAlabama Jane Brown was born and raised in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. She has lived in Atlanta, Herrenberg, Germany, Nashville/Franklin, Tennessee and the Eastern Shore of Maryland. She received her BA from Judson College for Women, and studied fiction writing with Barry Hannah at The University of Alabama while pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing. She attended the Sewanee Writers Conference and the Algonkian Writers Conference. The late Barry Hannah called Ms. Brown's writing, “a mixture of Flannery O'Connor meeting Erica Jong for a shoot out at the O. K. Corral.” Ms. Brown resides in Alabama with her husband in a historic log cabin with a menagerie of ghosts and cats. Ms. Brown has published on webdelsol under “New Voices” and is at work on her third novel, The Ghost Dancer's Shirt.

23 strange-but-true stories of women flirting with perdition... In the steamy South, temptation is as wild and plentiful as kudzu. Whether the sin in question is skinny-dipping or becoming an unlikely porn star, running rum or renting out a room to a pair of exhibitionistic adulterers, in these true stories women defy tradition and forge their own paths through life—often learning unexpected lessons from the experience. As Dorothy Allison writes in her introduction, “The most dangerous stories are the true ones, the ones we hesitate to tell, the adventures laden with fear or shame or the relentless pull of regret. Some of those are about things that we are secretly deeply proud to have done.” A diverse array of contributors—mothers, daughters, sisters, best friends, fiancées, divorcees, professors, poets, lifeguards-in-training, lapsed Baptists, tipsy debutantes, middle-aged lesbians—lend their voices to this collection. Introspective and abashed, joyous and triumphant (but almost never apologetic), they remind us that sin, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

Many scholars, according to Bertram Wyatt-Brown, have mistakenly attributed the coming of the Civil War solely to the slaveholding South’s determination to retain black bondage as a means of economic and political advantage. That view, he maintains, too readily diminishes the ethical dynamics involved in the chasm between antebellum North and South. In Yankee Saints and Southern Sinners, Wyatt-Brown explores in a series of wide-ranging essays the ethical differences—epically with regard to honor, liberty, and slavery—that divided the two regions of the country. Slavery was, of course, the crucial issue in the conflict, but such moral concerns as honor and shame, conscience and guilt were inextricably a part of the dispute as well. Northerners, under abolitionist and antislavery guidance, came to regard slavery as a violation of American conscience and understandings of individuality, personal liberty and civic responsibility, whereas soothers adhered to an ethical scheme based on traditional concepts of honor. Wyatt-Brown suggests that to most southern whites the rubric of honor was much more than a matter of duels and political posturing. It was instead an integral part of the moral and cultural heritage of the region, affecting a variety of social relationships. Sometimes the dictates of honor were even more powerful than the Christian morality that nearly all Americans espoused. Using Stanley Elkins’ antislavery interpretation as a point of departure, Wyatt-Brown devotes the first part of the book to the abolitionists’ dynamic relationship to evangelical culture in which conscience, implanted in childhood, became the primary ethical code guiding reformers. In the most dramatic and probing chapter in this section, he shows how the violent “antinomian” John Brown capitalized on the tensions between Christian conscience and primal manhood to gratify his own and his fellow countrymen’s desire for righteous glory, albeit for noble ends. The second half of the book reveals the contrasting ethical spirit of the South, as explained in W.J. Cash’s Mind of the South. After placing the proslavery argument in the context of evangelical and, later, secular “modernity,” Wyatt-Brown analyzes the ethical texture of secessionism in one of the book’s most original and intriguing arguments. Differences over the meaning and applicability of honor and shame, he contends, played a major part in the South’s struggle in 1860 and 1861 over secession and the North’s response to it. Making abundant use of anthropological, sociological, and psychological insights, Bertram Wyatt-Brown offers here an interpretation of the causes of the Civil war that is both provocative and persuasive.

The Graveyard Queen is on the hunt for a killer as supernatural forces invade her mind in this contemporary gothic thriller. I am a living ghost, a wanderer in search of my purpose and place. I’m a cemetery restorer by trade, but my calling has evolved from that of ghost seer to death walker to detective of lost souls. I solve the riddles of the dead so the dead will leave me alone. I’ve come to Seven Gates Cemetery nursing a broken heart, but peace is hard to come by . . . for the ghosts here and for me. When the body of a young woman is discovered in a caged grave, I know that I’ve been summoned for a reason. Only I can unmask her killer. I want to trust the detective assigned to the case, for he is a ghost seer like me. But how can I put my faith in anyone when supernatural forces are manipulating my every thought? When reality is ever-changing? And when the one person I thought I could trust above all others has turned into a diabolical stranger?

Sexy. Spanish. Rockstar. Trouble. Studying abroad in Spain is a total escape for me. An escape from real life, from the pressures of college, and, most importantly, an escape from the drama surrounding my parents’ divorce. If I hook up with hot Madrileños along the way? All the better. When I meet gorgeous Spaniard Javier Montoya at a bar, I assume our hook-up is just a one time thing. Yeah, he’s the sexiest guy I’ve ever slept with. But he’s also the guitarist for one of the hottest bands in Europe. With his reputation, I know I need to keep things casual. But when our one night stand blossoms into genuine friendship, Javier starts to wonder out loud if I’m the “forever girl” he’s been looking for. Too bad I believe forever is more fiction than fairy tale. I’m a first-hand witness to the nasty the divorce my parents are going through, and there’s no way Javier can convince me that fairy tales exist. Hot sex? Yes. Happily Ever After? Absolutely not. But this sexy Spaniard is out to prove me wrong… LESSONS IN GRAVITY is a STANDALONE romance in the STUDY ABROAD series. The books in this series are complete standalones with interconnected characters, and can be read in any order. LESSONS IN LOVE: Rafa + Vivian's Story LESSONS IN GRAVITY: Javier + Maddie's Story LESSONS IN LETTING GO: Rhys + Laura's Story LESSONS IN LOSING IT: Frederik + Rachel's Story

A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM ALEX GARLAND, STARRING NATALIE PORTMAN AND OSCAR ISAAC The Southern Reach Trilogy begins with Annihilation, the Nebula Award-winning novel that "reads as if Verne or Wellsian adventurers exploring a mysterious island had warped through into a Kafkaesque nightmare world" (Kim Stanley Robinson). Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; the second expedition ended in mass suicide; the third expedition in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another. The members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within weeks, all had died of cancer. In Annihilation, the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, we join the twelfth expedition. The group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain, record all observations of their surroundings and of one another, and, above all, avoid being contaminated by Area X itself. They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers—they discover a massive topographic anomaly and life forms that surpass understanding—but it's the surprises that came across the border with them and the secrets the expedition members are keeping from one another that change everything.